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Our secret blackberry patch is gone

I have no sympathy for people who accidentally cause incredible destruction. Humans are fundamentally, across the entire planet, an invasive species. Our ability to dramatically evolve within a single generation has taken us outside the world governed by ecosystems. We do not play ball with the world. We control it, outcompeting everything around us. Like all invasive species, we will live high until we have consumed the entirety of our environment. And when there’s nothing left, we too shall die. 

If we manage to survive what Carl Sagan called our adolescence, our descendents will look back on us with scorn. We triggered one of the planet’s great extinction events, all because people needed something to do, because we decided that people having something to do was a precondition for participating in society. We even realized what we were doing, and then we did it anyway. 

That 15 year old kid who threw the firecracker that destroyed the Columbia Gorge: I hope deep guilt and shame haunt him for the rest of his life. His is the great human sin writ small. Forgiving him means forgiving ourselves for what we’re doing to the world. We don’t deserve it.

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What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?

Most of my thinking on the continuing brutality in Ferguson, MO. has been less about the protests themselves and more about what on earth the police might be thinking. Their behavior has been not just ruthless, but so consistently bizarre and they are clearly operating in a different world from everyone else. Their frame of reference has to be completely different from that of everyone on the outside.

But yesterday, after some short and inexplicable peace when the police took a breather, they were back at it, this time breaking out LRAD sound cannons, and I think I figured something out. Looking at the protest section of the Wikipedia article, a few of the American incidents have something in common: they’re protests organized against very large institutions. Two of the deployments were against a G20 meeting and against Occupy protestors. It was also deployed but not used at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

And here’s where I think the fault is: the Ferguson Police Department things that this is one of those. They think people are raging against the machine, and they just need to be scared away and everything will go back to normal, and the freaks will be beaten back into their little holes. What they don’t seem to fully understand is that the institution being protested is them.

Continue reading “What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?”

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The UCSB shooting

Oh my god, I just woke up and didn’t know about this. I’m so upset, fuck. I’ve been getting more upset by misogyny as time goes by, and especially over the past month, but then this had to happen.

It sounds like the shooter had high functioning autism, which is not by itself mental illness, although something else must have been there. (The Sandy Hook shooter was similar.)

But the post is correct: the cause here is the fucked up attitude from PUAs and other misogynistic horrible people. There are definitely other issues, such as the proliferation of guns (mass shootings are definitely the crime of our time, these things move in trends) and how society treats people who are not neurotypical or have mental illnesses.

But what we need to talk about right now is misogyny and entitlement and the cultural expectation that men should get something for nothing.